The News Without Comment

A few days ago UK-based videogame studio Sensible Object launched its second Kickstarter campaign for its augmented reality (AR) compatible building game Beasts of Balance, expanding the core experience with new creatures and a competitive gameplay mode known as ‘Battles’. Today, the developer has announced it has been selected as one of nine companies to participate in the Amazon Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars.

The Amazon Alexa Accelerator is a 13-week schedule of mentorship, training and collaboration, where Sensible Object will be able to develop new concepts that illustrate the potential of voice Artificial Intelligence (AI) to augment the play experience. Once the programme has been completed, a demo day will be held in Seattle on 17th October, where the participants will present prototypes and meet with potential investors.

“This is a very exciting time for us. We’re in the middle of our second crowdfunding campaign, in which we reached our goal in under six hours and surpassed six figures in less than a day. And now, with the combination of the Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars and our latest funding round, we’re positioned extremely well for incredible growth in 2017, 2018 and beyond,” explained Alex Fleetwood, CEO of Sensible Object in a statement. “We will be integrating Alexa to create novel twists on familiar play experiences, and our hybrid physical/digital model means we can rapidly turn that development effort into sales revenue. It’s the next step in our vision to build the play platform for the connected home.”

“From our first meeting, we’ve been extremely impressed with Alex [Fleetwood, CEO] and the entire Sensible Object team. Their vision to merge physical and digital gaming by harnessing devices already adopted into the connected home is powerful and exciting,” said Aviel Ginzburg, Techstars Managing Director for the Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars. “Their execution to date with their first game Beasts of Balance has proven that not only are they the right people to tackle this opportunity, but that they’ve discovered an entirely new and highly engaging genre of social gaming where friends and family play face to face, rather than face to screen.”

Beasts of Balance is a tower building game with an AR twist. Players are called Divine Creators and they have to carefully stack artefacts to reach high scores. The AR side comes in when deciding what objects to stack next to uncover new beasts. For example, stack an Octopus and a digital Octopus appears. If a Migrate Artefact is then used, the Octopus is turned into a land-dwelling Rocktopus.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Sensible Object and all AR related videogames, reporting back with the latest updates.